Citizen Cash usefully combines biographical detail and cultural analysis with music history to provide an in-depth portrait of the ways Cash acquired his political and social ideas and wove them into the fabric of his music..

Cash’s empathy,' Foley proposes, 'transcended ideology—it was supra-partisan.' It’s an appealing argument for the hymning of bygone communions of daring artists and mass audiences. Unfortunately, it’s not really borne out by the facts of Cash’s life.

Foley is a well-regarded historian and does an excellent job of placing Cash’s life and career within the contexts of his time.

Foley’s method is to remind each set of fans of the other Cash, the Cash they’ve conveniently forgotten, and then show how he made up a single human being, one who did his own justice to the complex task of being an American. The argument has a certain wishfulness to it. To begin with, there’s the faith Foley places in 'empathy,' or Cash’s tendency to be 'guided by his own emotional and visceral responses to the issues.' What thinking person in 2022—amid the outrage and umbrage Olympics that is American life—still wants an emotional response? We prefer, I think, respect, health care, and a living wage. The case made by Cash is less on behalf of 'empathy' than of a world in which partisan affiliation isn’t a depressingly strong predictor of—well, everything else, including musical taste.

With sufficient detail and a gift for storytelling, Foley explores these and many other aspects of Cash’s complex life.